This was a project taken up about some point in the latter half of my senior year of high school. If I remember correctly, I originally set out to make it for a peer in that class whom I admired, though I never ended up giving it to her. I have a difficult complex when it comes to things I’ve made with any bit of meaning. I end up unable to part with it once it creates that much sentiment in me. I should be able to recognize that as an artist, it’s horrible to make things to give to people and not give them. Who knows? That girl I made this flower for never got it, so until then it doesn’t meant anything, and maybe she would have appreciated. The meaning is in permanent stasis.

With a little more detail here, you can see that the stamen is all wrapped up with steel wire. The red petals are made from red rosin core wire, and the black ones are made from tough crafting wire of some kind. This was supposed to be a follow up to the Wire Rose project, and actually this Dart Flower was a mesh of three metal flowers I had made to accompany the original. So there were three flowers I made. One was copper and red, one was black steel, and another one was a mix. I tore the copper and black ones apart, and added them to the mixed one. The Dart Flower is a product of three of its predecessors.

Thin mechanical wire and copper wire, with an 8 gauge black wire center. After the Dishonored Mask Build I felt pretty struck by the idea of mechanical flowers because I think I saw one of my peers making one during class one day. This is autumn of 2014, and I had intended it as a gift for my then significant other. I took a lot of care to put some details into making the thorns seen along its stem, and to add the two palm tree looking sprouts off the side of it. Probably the most difficult part was knowing when to stop, but I stopped at the perfect time. It’s not uncomfortable to hold, it fits nicely into one’s hand, and it can be potted like a real rose! If I were going to expand on this design, I think a cool idea would be to leave it in a vase to rust the wire towards the bottom, mimicking how you’d normally keep a rose alive by having it in water, right? It’d be neat to do in the future.